The Ecohouse Living-Learning program at the University of Maryland - College Park proudly presents this blog.

10/29/08

Over my dead body?

Over the next few days, I'll be posting Josh's eco-tips, sent out in the form of articles this time around. They're quite interesting!

This first one is very relevant to the holiday season. No, I don't mean Christmas, New Year, or even Thanksgiving. I mean All Hallows' Eve, Día de los Muertes, Samhain, and so on. Whatever you celebrate, this is the time of year to think about death.

Well, if that's the sort of thing that floats your boat. For some people, it's more of a time to hand out candy to throngs of adorable children. Others dress as their favorite pun or pop culture figure and go out to impress partygoers with their cleverness. Yet others dress down and face the frigid October evening as some permutation of a seductive (insert profession here). "Sexy Environmental Consultant," for instance.

Still, let's pretend that we're all thinking about death.

"I'll wait."

Thinking about it? Good. Now, here's an interesting thing you could do with your mortal coil once you've shuffled it off:

That is pretty awesome: a full ecosystem approach to the old idea of planting a tree or letting a barrow grow over your buried body. Of course, if I got one of these, I might advise my loved ones to save boat fuel and not visit my grave site. I could circumvent this issue by ensuring that all of my loved ones are fish, but then who would pay for my grave? Hopefully, I'll have several decades to figure it out.

Nothing lasts. Things will grow over our grave sites, many things in succession, and I'm pretty cool with that. This article simply gives you the option of having marine things grow over you instead of terrestrial things, at least until the boundaries of the oceans and continents change. By then your body will be broken down all over the place, and think of all the ways it will contribute to earth systems! You won't have an ecological footprint; you'll be the ecosystem that people tread upon.

"'Scuse me? I'll be the what?"

Conservationists always talk about future generations. Well, if you think about it, we're walking on, breathing, eating, drinking, and even polluting the past ones. Nature's so great at recycling that we don't usually think of it like that.

Anyway, the zombies haven't gotten to me yet, so I still have my brains intact, philosophical ramblings notwithstanding. I'm going to move on from thinking about that stuff and think instead about what I'm going to do tomorrow.